X.Org Releases First Modular Source Roll-Up

NewsForge is reporting that X.Org has released their first modular roll-up release. From the article: "All X11R7.0 derivative ("modularized") releases divide the source code into logically distinct modules, separately developed, built, and maintained by the community of X.Org developers. This concentrates and accelerates development time, supporting continuous modification, testing, and publication of each module.The new modular format offers focused development, and rapid and independent updates and distribution of tested modular components as they are ready, freed from the biennial maintenance release timetable."

Gentoo

[binkzz]

This should make it a whole lot easier on the Gentoo user machines - we will no longer have to recompile the entire X.Org source on every update.

I heard rumours of KDE going a similar route in the future.

Re:Still doesn't fix

[Chris Pimlott]

Whether or not that's true, I can't say. But it should be easier to revamp the X driver model without impacting the rest of the code now that it's all been properly modularized.

Re:Gentoo

[rmsmith]

KDE is already modularised. See the KDE split ebuilds in portage, for example.

Good thing!

[gweihir]

A monolithic system with poor or unstable interfaces is a maintenance nightmare. Maybe this explains why in the end XFree86 was so slow in supporting new hardware drivers. I still remember having had to patch the sources manually for my ATI Radeon 9600XT card, just because the PCI ID of that card was still not in the release quite some time after the card was on the market. Really bad.

With a modular built, they can now change one part, like the drivers, with little fear of introducing problems in other parts. High time this happened. I am looking forward to the things to come.

Re:Still doesn't fix

[siride]

You don't understand what modular means in this case. It only means that the various components of X are now in separate autotooled packages. There hasn't been any change in the existing modules, only now they are available separately rather than as part of a single monolithic tarball with a monolithic build system.

X11R7.0 was already modular.

[Morty]

X.org has been modular for a while -- X11R7.0 was already modular in December 2005. The real news here is that X.org released X11R7.1, not that they've gone modular.

One thing I'd like to see is an ordered list of dependencies. I still do manual builds on one system, to stay in practice. Building X11R7.0 was so painful, I stuck with X11R6.9. When using a distro that does the heavy lifting, X11R7.0 is great, but sorting out the dependencies in dozens of modules is a PITA if you're trying to build it manually. I bet the distro maintainers are cursing the X.org people.

Re:Gentoo

[rdwald]

There's a difference between hard-masking and keyword masking. Essentially, Gentoo has three levels of packages: "stable," "masked," and "hard-masked." Masking involves just putting a tilde in front of your architecture to get the software. You can use the /etc/portage/package.keywords file to specify packages you always want the masked version of; I've done this with Firefox, for example. There's another level of masking, which is called hard-masking. To remove a hard-mask, you've got to put the package in /etc/portage/package.unmask, and you need to list a specific version of the software you want to unmask. In general, it seems reasonable to have a few masked things installed on your system, but these aren't the same as hard-masked packages.

Re:Gentoo

[EzInKy]

Wait, if you don't even have xorg-x11 in your package.keywords file, wouldn't you get 6.8.2 installed? How'd you manage without that?


All three of my machines have "~amd64" or "~x86" in their make.confs.

Re:Gentoo

[buysse]

Sorry. After work, where people do seem to be that .. unobservant, it's entirely believable. It does make it hard to spot a joke.

No Need To Scrap X

[krmt]

The raster graphics are horrible. I realize that redesigning the rendering system will be arduous and time consuming. But I think it wold be nice if the *nix rendering system would advance past the 70's.

Done [freedesktop.org].

Re:Why not scrap X

[siride]

Let's just let Keith Packard do the talking: http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2000/render. html [keithp.com]

In other news ...

[lord_rob the only on]

XFree86 4.6.0 [xfree86.org] has been released. I thought that project was dead but appearently it isn't completely (yet).

Re:In other news ...

[msh104]

it never died. it's just developing even slower then before. but they did already made another release after the split before this one, which didn't got any coverage on slashdot either. it looks like the open source comminity has choosen to silence it to death. :p

Re:-1, Wrong

[realnowhereman]

No it's not [wikipedia.org]. Every PCI device has a unique number assigned to it, made up of a vendor code and a product number. The pciids [sourceforge.net] project maintains a useful list of these IDs.

In addition, each device plugged in to your system gets a PCI address, but that is entirely dependent on your particular system.

Run "lspci -vv" one day and you can have a look at the information supplied.

Re:My feature request: truly buffered windows

[On Lawn]

NX helps your situation in general. But to answer your specific question:

Does the functionality exist right now to fully buffer that window so that it doesn't have to completely redraw each time?

Yes, its been in X since as long as I can remember. Look for turning "Backingstore" and "Saveunders" on for your specific graphics card. Usually in the video device section of your X configuration file you put...

Option "Backingstore" "yes"

But you might have more hoops to go before getting the full save-unders.

Re:How about RDP access to X sessions

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeNX works just as well for remote X sessions as RDP does for Windows terminal servers.

See Xrdp

[Anonymous Coward]

You got me thinking (and searching), and I found Xrdp (http://xrdp.sourceforge.net/). It seems a little hackish (it sets up a VNC session which is then translated to RDP), but seems to be a start.

Re:In other news X Windows has forked

[Anonymous Coward]

When the fork took happened?

I want to say 2003 or 2004. Wikipedia says the X.Org foundation was founded in January, 2004, but work on a forked tree had been going on for months before that.

Why?

Some of the "all talk and no code" XFree86 project members were upset about things like XRender. The people doing the real innovation were long fed up with this and other things.

Which developers went to X.org

Pretty much all of them.

and which stayed to XFree86?

Pretty much none.

What's the difference in the philosophy?

One of them is an actual project has the support of just about everybody. The other one is XFree86.

On a side note, have you been living under a rock?